Bannon, the executive chair of conservative media outlet Breitbart News – which, under his leadership, has effectively become the media arm of the alt-right – has overseen the confluence of Breitbart becoming an aggressively pro-Trump outlet and becoming an unapologetically white nationalist space, in which racism, nativism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism form a toxic stew of white supremacist hatred, commingling with the favorite conservative bailiwicks of misogyny and queerphobia.

Trump entered the political sphere in 2011 as a prominent birther, questioning President Obama’s citizenship – a campaign he has never disavowed and about which he now merely says: “I don’t talk about it anymore.”

His opening salvo in this election was using his announcement address to assert: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

He has subsequently careened at full speed through the intervening year and a half with a ceaseless onslaught of bigoted statements and proposals.

He proposed building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border; he has proposed deporting millions of undocumented immigrants; he has proposed killing civilians to stop radical jihadists; he has tepidly disavowed white supremacist supporters; he has retweeted neo-Nazis; he proposed banning Muslims from entering the U.S.; he accused Indiana-born U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel of being unable to be impartial because of his Mexican heritage; he attacked Gold Star parents because they criticized his anti-Muslim policies; he has used anti-Semitic symbols and slogans and dog whistles; he has routinely used racist language; he asserted that President Obama is the founder of ISIS; he has spoken to white audiences about how horrendous he believes Black Americans’ lives and communities are; he has proposed a purity test for immigrants; he has solicited volunteers for voter intimidation; he has proposed patriotism and “national pride” indoctrination for schoolchildren.

This is, I regret to say, not even a comprehensive list, but a mere snapshot of the sort of racial bigotry that is central to Trump’s campaign.

It is no coincidence that white nationalism is going mainstream, ushered to new visibility and prominence by the Republican Party nominee, in this moment.

We sit at a historical pivot point – at the end of the presidency of our nation’s first Black president and on the precipice of the likely presidency of our nation’s first woman president. White nationalism is about maintaining white supremacy; it is also, and equally, about maintaining male supremacy. The patriarchy and white power have always coexisted, reinforcing each other in a recursive loop to uphold white male dominance in America.

Which brings us to Part 2.

Sexism

Trump’s extensive history of unapologetic public sexism is well-documented – and long predates the 2016 presidential campaign. Just throughout the duration of this campaign, however, he has racked up quite the extraordinary record of demeaning women.

One of the earliest – and most widely reported – incidents was his accusation that debate moderator Megyn Kelly, who had asked him about his history of sexism, had “blood coming out of her wherever,” which was only the first of a number of inappropriate comments he’s directed at female journalists, including Katy Tur, whom he told to “be quiet” and has called “Little Katy, third-rate journalist.”

He has courted extremists who foment hate both here and export it abroad. His running mate, Mike Pence, as a congressman in 2009, opposed language in federal legislation to monitor and combat human rights violations against LGBTQ people abroad, accusing Democrats of attempting to “promote a gay rights agenda around the globe.”

Together, Donald Trump and Mike Pence seem to have little interest in — and perhaps little understanding of — the dire plight faced by asylum seekers, including those who seek to flee the violence of ISIS or escape the anti-LGBTQ regime in Russia.

Hostility to the Press

In June, Politico published an article headlined “Washington Post ban is latest battle in Trump’s war with the press,” in which were detailed more than a dozen instances of Trump denying or withdrawing media access. In several cases, reporters were removed from Trump events after asking a question or having published an article Trump didn’t like.

And Trump’s war on the media hardly stops with blocking access. Until he unceremoniously fired his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski for entirely different reasons, Trump was, as previously mentioned, willing and eager to defend Lewandowski against charges he assaulted a female reporter, and evidently had no issue with Lewandowski’s being accused of “pushing a CNN reporter who tried to ask the candidate a question; physically confronting an aide for a rival campaign in a post-debate spin room; publicly shouting threats over the phone at a restaurant; making sexual comments about female journalists; and calling up women in the campaign press corps late at night to make unwanted romantic advances.”

Trump himself has launched incredible personal attacks on members of the press, attacking journalists like Kelly and Tur; openly mocking disabled reporter Serge Kovaleski; ginning up outrage against the press at campaign events; and launching an all-out jeremiad against the media during a press conference, during which he called the press “sleazy” and “unbelievably dishonest.”

I love watching these poor, pathetic people (pundits) on television working so hard and so seriously to try and figure me out. They can't!

Ties to Russia

There have long been questions about some of Trump’s advisers’ ties to foreign governments. In particular, his former campaign co-chair Paul Manafort has built a career specializing in working for arms dealers, dictators, and foreign oligarchs. He was “for many years on the payroll of the Putin-backed former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych.”

In this profile of Manafort, Franklin Foer documents his long-term relationship with Trump, which has existed in tandem with some of the most odious tyrants around the globe.

Further, as TPM’s Josh Marshall details, “Trump appears to have a deep financial dependence on Russian money from persons close to Putin. …There is also something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of evidence suggesting Putin-backed financial support for Trump or a non-tacit alliance between the two men.”

Despite Trump’s business acumen being touted as his key qualification for the US presidency, it is the very lack of his skills as a businessman that has brought him to a point in which he depends on foreign cash – which may have critically compromised the Republican nominee for the presidency.

Meanwhile, as federal officials have come to believe that the Russians are attempting to influence the U.S. election (a view shared by New Yorker staff writer Adrian Chen who “discovered that Russian internet trolls — paid by the Kremlin to spread false information on the internet — have been behind a number of ‘highly coordinated campaigns’ to deceive the American public”), Trump and his campaign were further allying themselves with Russia and Russian hackers in troubling ways.

First, Trump’s aides successfully changed the Republican platform to be more pro-Putin, reneging on a promise to provide aid to the Ukrainians in their struggle against Russian aggression.

Trump also infamously invited Russian hackers to commit espionage against the U.S. government, prompting widespread criticism and expressions of deep distrust of Trump. Former CIA Chief Leon Panetta bluntly stated that it called into question Trump’s loyalty to the U.S. Former acting director of the CIA Michael Morrell wrote:

Donald J. Trump is not only unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our national security. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated.

In recent days, Trump has come under fire for praising Putin while attacking U.S. generals and for doing this: “Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump criticized U.S. foreign policy and the American political press corps Thursday during an interview on RT America, a state-owned Russian television network.”

Because the proceeds from sales of campaign swag are considered campaign contributions, no one who is not an American citizens can purchase it, as foreign nationals “are prohibited from making any contributions or expenditures in connection with any election in the U.S.” So, unless employees at the Trump corporate store are checking the citizenship of every buyer, they may be in violation of campaign finance law.

What’s more likely, however, is that this isn’t technically being sold as campaign swag, even though it bears his campaign slogan. In other words: Trump may be tricking people into purchasing items they believe will fund his campaign, but instead goes directly into his pocket.

A person running for the United States presidency is given one of the most visible platforms on the planet. Trump has chosen to use that platform to respond to heinous acts of violence not with measured statesmanship, but as though he’s just run a football into the end zone.

Lack of Transparency

Trump has repeatedly demonstrated hostility toward meaningful transparency, eschewing all disclosures that we have come to expect from presidential candidates in the modern era.

He refuses to release his taxes, giving ludicrous excuses about why he cannot release them.

Trump has also provided no visibility into the workings of the Donald J. Trump Foundation despite the fact it was used at least once to give a political contribution, in violation of federal tax law, to a campaign group connected to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. At the time, Bondi “was considering whether to investigate fraud allegations against Trump University. She decided not to pursue the case.”

And then there is the issue of his healthcare disclosure, which consists of one laughably inadequate letter addressing his medical history and current health. This is the entirety of the medical report offered by Trump:

Nearly every place we look into any aspect of Trump’s personal, professional, or political life, there is both behavior and rhetoric that, by any reasonable measure, should disqualify him from the U.S. presidency. Rarely does he seem inclined to conceal any of these things; to the contrary, he often brags about them.

So one can only imagine what sort of scandal and outrage lies within documents to which he refuses access.

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